You can also use sexps with cl-ppcre to identify regexps instead of strings, which also solves the problem (and they should be much easier to memorize and read as well). As reference, see the method of CREATE-SCANNER that works on parse-trees (roll down the link I provided a little bit and you will see it).

Macros, baby. You have everything you need at your fingertips already. If you're doing a lot of regex work, you typically will have a couple of patterns that you are using often and you can just use a simple macro or two to optimize the syntax for those.

I had another look at cl-ppcre's API and I see that it's actually easy to use. It's just the the function/macro names are "weird" (to a Lisp newbie). In fact, I won't even have to write macros to ease things.